Cotillard shares her Sept. 11 views

Actress questions U.S. gov't accounts of the attacks

Only a week after picking up her best actress Oscar, Marion Cotillard’s unconventional views on the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have come to light.

In a year-old interview revived Saturday on French website Marianne2 the Gallic thesp questions the U.S. government’s accounts of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

“I think we’re lied to about a number of things,” Cotillard said. “We see other towers of the same kind being hit by planes. Are they burned? There was a tower, I believe it was in Spain, which burned for 24 hours. It never collapsed. None of these towers collapsed. And there (in New York), in a few minutes, the whole thing collapsed.”

The interview with Cotillard was first broadcast on the program “Paris Premiere — Paris Derniere” a year ago, but it attracted little attention then. Because of Cotillard’s heightened profile following her Oscar win for playing Edith Piaf in “La Vie en rose,” a transcript of the interview was posted on Marianne 2.

Following its posting Saturday, news of her views spread rapidly, appearing in London newspaper the Sunday Mail and then moving like wildfire across the Internet.

In the interview, she went on to claim that the World Trade Center was so outdated that it would have cost more to modernize than to rebuild.

“It was a money-sucker because they were finished, it seems to me, by 1973, and to re-cable all that, to bring up-to-date all the technology and everything, it was a lot more expensive, that work, than destroying them,” she said.

Cotillard capped that by appearing to sign up to another conspiracy theory, questioning whether the 1969 Moon landing took place.

“Did a man really walk on the moon? I saw plenty of documentaries on it, and I really wondered. And in any case I don’t believe all they tell me, that’s for sure.”

Cotillard’s lawyer, Vincent Toledano, told French news agency AFP she had “never intended to contest nor question the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and regrets the way old remarks have been taken out of context.”

The French thesp has recently begun to cross over to U.S. films. She’s cast alongside Johnny Depp and Christian Bale in Michael Mann’s “Public Enemies” for Universal. Cotillard also has been lined up to star alongside Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz and Sophia Loren in the Rob Marshall-directed musical “Nine” for the Weinstein Co.

It remains to be seem what effect the revelation of her beliefs will have on her future in U.S. films.